Ubuntu: Make It Raine

DISCLAIMER:This guide is for Ubuntu 11.10. I’ve tested this guide on 2 different machines using Ubuntu 11.10 and I get different results. So, your mileage may vary. I am very interested in why this would not work, so if you’re reading this and have any guesses, or you’ve tried it and needed to make things work in another way, I very much would like to get you’re feedback. On the non-working machine, I am unable to install the Raine package, as it still complains that it can’t find the required dependencies. All the libraries exist in usr/lib32 before I try to install the package. Thanks, and good luck.

You’ve played Nintendo games on Ubuntu. You’ve played Sega. You’ve played Playstation and Mame, but have you ever made it Raine?

Raine is a arcade emulator which emulates some games which use M68000 or M68020 CPU’s. The main focus is on emulating Taito and Jaleco games.

The emulator is well written and is capable of emulating some games which MAME can’t emulate. Some games which are playable with this emulator are classics like Operation Wolf and Darius.

Mhmmmm… Darius. My favorite is Darius Gaiden, and with the assistance of Raine, I can destroy gigantic fish-robots whenever I want to blow of some steam. My favorite version of this game is the home port for Sega Saturn, but I’m rarely near the TV that it’s tethered to. When you hear the name Taito, and you get a little tingle in your left hand that urges you to find the nearest 8-way joystick, then you’ve probably played a few of their sleeper hits from the 80’s and 90’s. You probably also remember that this is the hardware that a little franchise called Ninja Gaiden was born on.

Unfortunately, its biggest benefit is its biggest weakness… It’s written in assembly for 32-bit. There is not, nor will there ever be, a 64-bit version. Let The Powerbase take care of this one for you. Here is how we get it going in 64-bit Ubuntu.

First, download the Raine package here. This package was built on an Debian ‘Wheezy‘ machine. I contacted the package maintainer last month to see if he could make an updated one as the one from the website was packaged around the time of Ubuntu 8.04. He happily obliged and was nice enough to lay out this basic process to me in an email. I took a different approach and cleaned everything up a little bit, and this is what I came up with.

Drudgery…

Make a directory called tmp and get inside of it.

$ mkdir ~/temp

$ cd ~/temp

Now, we have to download it’s dependencies manually. Here are the packages we need to get.

Dean Howell has over a decade of experience with Linux and nearly 2 decades of experience with computers in general. Currently, Dean is Editor-in-chief of The Powerbase and also works for one of the world's largest providers of Linux-based NVRs.